While it’d be great if we were all consummate grammarians, you don’t need to be one to score very well on the SAT writing section. You just need to know how to spot the most commonly tested errors, and (on Sentence Improvement and Paragraph Improvement, anyway) fix them. I’ve made mention of Dangling Modifiers before (more…)
I remember taking a short, but very hard calculus test in high school, and watching my friend hand in his test 10 minutes before time was called. I shot him the requisite stink-eye glare, and got back to work, struggling to integrate a function that was giving me absolutely no love. I don’t remember the (more…)
I’ve done my best here to be faithful to the structure of an SAT section 10, although I’ve obviously been a bit loose with the subject matter. Since this is designed to mirror a section 10, though, you should time yourself on it. You’ll get 10 minutes to complete the last writing section on the (more…)
source I was looking over the visitor stats for this blog last night and I was pleasantly surprised to discover a small international audience! The SAT is administered all over the world, and at least a few people have visited this site from (in order of frequency) Singapore, Hungary, India, Vietnam, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Iran, (more…)
image source It’s been over a week, and still not a day goes by that I don’t see a new article bashing The College Board for its decision to use reality TV as an essay topic. The topic caught me off guard just as it did everyone else, but I can’t justify all the hand-wringing (more…)
UPDATE June 2015: The links in this post have been broken for some time. That’s not necessarily surprising, as I originally wrote it in early 2011. I’m leaving it up for archival purposes, but don’t bother clicking the links. Although the College Board’s Questions of the Day do remain archived on the CB site, it’s not so (more…)
source The Paragraph Improvement section accounts for only 6 questions per test, so mastering it shouldn’t be your first priority, but it should be an eventual priority. You’re going to see a lot of the same grammatical themes we’ve already discussed in Error ID and Sentence Improvement popping up again here. In fact, if you’ve (more…)
All the rules from Error ID still apply, but when you’re doing a Sentence Improvement question, you have to think about the following as well. Run-On Sentences. Since the only thing you need to know about Run-On Sentences on the SAT is that you can’t tie two independent clauses (translation: an independent clause could stand alone (more…)
You should be mechanical in checking every Error ID question for the following. Verbs. Start here. If there is a verb underlined in the sentence, you need to check: Subject/Verb Agreement. The SAT’s favorite ways to trick you include: Prepositional phrases (The display case of trophies at the top of the stairs in my father’s (more…)
You’ve got a lot of latitude in selecting your examples, but you should try to use at least one (ideally two) example that will impress your reader. That means Literature (with a capital ‘L’ like a book you read in school and can discuss in depth), a historical event or figure, or a personal event (more…)
Your essay is technically worth ⅓ of your Writing score, but in practical terms it’s worth less than that. That’s because the technical range of possible scores for your essay is 0-12, but most essays fall within a range of 6-10. So all those points that would come from scores 0-6 are basically free points (more…)
